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Agreed, I think the doomsday prepper angle makes it seem absurd. But take a step back and this is an INCREDIBLE display of technical capabilities of a single person. It crosses a handful of domains in terms of designing, building, assembling, configuring a Thing. Plus the background detail on component selection. And the writing is tight too.

I build things that roughly resemble this (low volume, custom, solving use cases that are too niche for an industrial offering to be created), for money. I'd hire this guy in a minute to outsource things to or collaborate with, so I see the project as a kind of personal resume.

IMO he should find a specific scenario where something along these lines would be valuable. One I am personally involved in is marine electronics diagnosis. Primarily NMEA2000 networks and the devices on them, and the same devices on Ethernet. It's too much detail to go into, plus I'm on a flight after spending a week in Vegas for a trade show, but with just a little bit of reconfiguration work this could be a Thing that higher end marine electronics techs would really dig. Then I think you could also delve deeper into the considerations put into the design and component selection details.

I get the feeling it's for fun. It's a maker's project, not a preppers project.

> I love how he has a link to "what is it for?" but never answers the question. As far as I can tell this is the technoblogger equivalent of end-of-society prepping?

> In the event of something so catastrophic happening that the internet stops functioning for an extended period of time, you're not going to be hauling this enormous brick around with you. It's absurd.

Yeah, I've always thought these kinds of things were more of a LARP gizmo than any kind of actual "prepping." The priorities are all wrong. IMHO, if society collapses, the things you need will drastically change from your needs now. You don't need an offline Wikipedia or Youtube, even if you use them all the time today, you need something a lot more compact and practical.

IMHO, a real post-apocalyptic "recovery kit" is a cubic meter of K12 textbooks, plus university-level ones on farming, engineering, and medicine locked a away in a time-capsule for a century post-event.

> LARP gizmo

This - I think it's really just a Fallout-aesthetic prop and bunch of text making pretend arguments that it's useful for anything.

> ... bluetooth keyboard, and a smartphone with an external storage memory device. ...

I'd replace this with an old Chromebook with regular Linux installed (very cheap, ~ $20 USD), and a 1TB micro-SD card. All solid-state (no hard drive), and good battery life.